


Namesake

by BritaniaVance



Series: The Force is Strong in My Family [2]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Angst, Drabble, Gen, Meta, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-20
Updated: 2016-01-20
Packaged: 2018-05-15 02:25:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,017
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5767714
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BritaniaVance/pseuds/BritaniaVance
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A look into the meaning behind Kylo Ren's abandoned name and a young Ben Solo's infatuation with his grandfather's legacy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Namesake

" _Tell me again_  
_what the spine_  
_of the universe_  
_feels like beneath_  
_your fingertips,_  
_callused and laden_  
_with stardust._  
_Show me the ghosts_  
_of the worlds_  
_consumed  
__in your wake._ "

— [Brittany Rubio](http://songofanothersummer.tumblr.com/), “Show me again the power of the darkness.” - [x](http://songofanothersummer.tumblr.com/post/136993751651/tell-me-again-what-the-spine-of-the-universe) \- Kylo Ren, _Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens._

 

Does Luke ever talk about Vader? About Anakin? Or is it still too personal, too private? A conversation to be earned, rewarded with time and trust? 

Now imagine a young Ben Solo, named for his uncle’s first mentor, his lifelong protector, but he is still a boy and very much haunted by the darkness Snoke planted within the depths of his yet-untapped mind. He knows that Vader - _Anakin -_ was his grandfather, but what else? He’s only ever heard ghost stories. His mother Leia knew him as a tyrant before she came to know him as a father, before she realized who he once was and what he once stood for, fighting alongside her adoptive father in near-mythic tales of the Clone Wars, yet she was always more in-tune with his grandmother, Padmé, than she ever was Anakin or Vader. Han, his father, only ever had close encounters with the man, who to him was more a legend than a mortal man, and Vader never fares as anything other than a stoic symbol of antagonism in his tales of daring escapes and narrow misses. But Luke, yes, _“Uncle Luke would know,”_ a young Ben might think, knowing that his lineage holds some unspoken weight in this galaxy, though he does not yet know why or how.

But when Ben goes to train with Luke, he is teeming with questions, questions Luke may advise that he tame with patience, with time. But Ben feels unhinged. He’s too far from home, he’s too far from his mother’s light. A light that had for so long kept the well of darkness within him at bay. And Luke is not ready for his dark questions, and  _Ben_  is not ready to ask them, nor is he ready to know the answers that lay beyond their veil. But as the Skywalker blood coursing through his young veins would have it, he is impatient, he is too curious, too eager to heed the ghostly voice in his head. He approaches the relic, Vader's mask,  Luke’s remaining heirloom - Anakin’s saber still long-lost, destined to guide another - and upon drawing near he feels it, its inexplicably hypnotic energy. Is it Snoke? Is it his heritage? Is it Vader’s ghost?

Ben touches the mask and he is transported in time, displaced in the very fabric of space, and he sees the breadth of the empire that fell the day he was conceived, he feels Padmé’s life force leaving him as if her love were in the very wells of his heart, he feels Vader gaining vitality as Anakin Skywalker diminishes, he spies the crooked smile of the Emperor long-dead, far more cragged and wicked than any young boys’ imagining - and then he feels it, the galaxy at his fingertips, worlds crushed in his wake. Before he can make sense of it, before he can come back to himself and what Luke has taught him, what his _mother_  has taught him, he hears _him_ , he hears Snoke.

  _How does it taste? The blood on your teeth? How does it feel? The very throat of the universe in your grasp?_

Ben brings a hand to his mouth, drawing scarlet fingertips across his lips, still parted with a shortness of breath and the taste of his own blood. His mind is already alight with the illusions of power, it is calm with the comfort of control. Snoke smiles, and Ben is no more.

And in his slow descent, he wonders. He asks Vader, _again and again_ , to remind him, _“Show me again, the power of the darkness.”_

But does he know that his vision was not a message, but a **warning**? And that perhaps what Luke had yet to tell him was _why_  he was named Ben Solo? That he was named for a guardian of the galaxy, one of its final keepers, in fact, and that he was named in hopes that the fate of the galaxy was in good hands? That Vader’s ghost was gone, Palpatine’s influence crushed and left forgotten? Does Ben Solo know he was named after one of the remaining sentinels of the known universe, one of the few who stood faithful, and did so until he was struck down by his very own student, and yet did so willingly at his own volition? Does Ben Solo know he was named after one of the remaining sentinels of the known universe, one of the few who stood faithful, and did so until he was struck down by his very student, and at his own volition? And it was not out of spite that he perished, _no,_ but out of faith? Did Ben Solo know what Ben Kenobi suffered, other than a name? Did anyone ever tell him about the student he mourned? The future he hoped for? The hope he saw in Luke? In Vader's very offspring?

Did Luke ever tell him? Did Luke know that he, too, would come to mourn his own student the very same way that Old Ben Kenobi once mourned his father Anakin? Kenobi’s brother, his friend?

Maybe Luke understood then, in theory, but he _knows_  now. Oh, how he knows.

But when he sees Rey, when she finally finds him at the very ends of the universe, he knows what she has seen, what message his father has relayed to her. He knows that Obi Wan has shown her the way, that he has guided her steps into this larger world and that she has seen the face of a young Ben Solo, the one he keeps hidden beneath the mask he wears to convince himself that he _is_  Kylo Ren. Luke knows that the ghostly shadows of his own past have spoken to her, and he hopes that this time it will be enough. It has to be.


End file.
